Quotes About Equality

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

He wants to put his story next to hers...'We got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kinda tomorrow.

What's fair ain't necessarily right

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.

Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when—especially when—it is seen through the prism of economic freedom.

For a nickel a month, Lady Jones did what whitepeople thought unnecessary if not illegal: crowded her little parlor with the colored children who had time for and interest in book learning.

How can he not love your hair? It's the same hair that grows out of his own armpits. The same hair that crawls up out his crotch on up his stomach. All over his chest. The very same. It grows out of his nose, over his lips, and if he ever lost his razor it would grow all over his face. It's all over his head, Hagar. It's his hair too. He got to love it.

I don't want to be a free nigger; I want to be a free man." "Don't we all. Look. Be what you want--- white or black. Choose. But if you choose black, you got to act black, meaning draw your manhood up—quicklike, and don't bring me no whiteboy sass." Hunter's Hunter and Godlen Gray

If you can't count they can cheat you. If you can't read they can beat you.

That whites not only had no patent on Christianity; they were often its obstacle. That Jesus had been freed from white religion, and he wanted these kids to know that they did not have to beg for respect; it was already in them, and they needed only to display it.

Probably best, he thought. If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up. Still

When you get these jobs you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle.

Everybody wants the life of a black man. White men want us dead or quiet—which is the same thing as dead. White women, same thing ... They won't even let you risk your own life, man, unless it's over them. You can't even die unless it's about them. What good is a man's life if he can't even choose what to die for?

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colouredwoman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

Well, you not the first by a long shot. An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.

We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where private profit drives public policy.

And him. Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose.

the lesson she had learned from her sixty years a slave and ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. "They don't know when to stop," she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.

I ain't. Keeps him dumb. He wouldn't know a good woman from a snake and he won't let nobody point out the difference.

There are no innocent white people, because every one of them is a potential nigger-killer, if not an actual one.

In pursuing your highest ambitions, don't let your personal safety diminish the safety of your stepsister. In wielding the power that is deservedly yours, don't permit it to enslave your stepsisters. Let your might and your power emanate from that place in you that is nurturing and caring. Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about "us"; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn't even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.